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The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations
Faces are processed in a network of areas within regions of the ventral visual stream. However, familiar faces typically are characterized by additional associated information, such as episodic memories or semantic biographical information as well. The acquisition of such non-sensory, identity-speci...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286950/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32342226 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02068-9 |
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author | Eick, Charlotta Marina Kovács, Gyula Rostalski, Sophie-Marie Röhrig, Lisa Ambrus, Géza Gergely |
author_facet | Eick, Charlotta Marina Kovács, Gyula Rostalski, Sophie-Marie Röhrig, Lisa Ambrus, Géza Gergely |
author_sort | Eick, Charlotta Marina |
collection | PubMed |
description | Faces are processed in a network of areas within regions of the ventral visual stream. However, familiar faces typically are characterized by additional associated information, such as episodic memories or semantic biographical information as well. The acquisition of such non-sensory, identity-specific knowledge plays a crucial role in our ability to recognize and identify someone we know. The occipital face area (OFA), an early part of the core face-processing network, is recently found to be involved in the formation of identity-specific memory traces but it is currently unclear if this role is limited to unimodal visual information. The current experiments used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to test whether the OFA is involved in the association of a face with identity-specific semantic information, such as the name or job title of a person. We applied an identity-learning task where unfamiliar faces were presented together with a name and a job title in the first encoding phase. Simultaneously, TMS pulses were applied either to the left or right OFA or to Cz, as a control. In the subsequent retrieval phase, the previously seen faces were presented either with two names or with two job titles and the task of the participants was to select the semantic information previously learned. We found that the stimulation of the right or left OFA reduced subsequent retrieval performance for the face-associated job titles. This suggests a causal role of the OFA in the association of faces and related semantic information. Furthermore, in contrast to prior findings, we did not observe hemispherical differences of the TMS intervention, suggesting a similar role of the left and right OFAs in the formation of the visual-semantic associations. Our results suggest the necessity to reconsider the hierarchical face-perception models and support the distributed and recurrent models. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7286950 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-72869502020-06-16 The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations Eick, Charlotta Marina Kovács, Gyula Rostalski, Sophie-Marie Röhrig, Lisa Ambrus, Géza Gergely Brain Struct Funct Original Article Faces are processed in a network of areas within regions of the ventral visual stream. However, familiar faces typically are characterized by additional associated information, such as episodic memories or semantic biographical information as well. The acquisition of such non-sensory, identity-specific knowledge plays a crucial role in our ability to recognize and identify someone we know. The occipital face area (OFA), an early part of the core face-processing network, is recently found to be involved in the formation of identity-specific memory traces but it is currently unclear if this role is limited to unimodal visual information. The current experiments used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to test whether the OFA is involved in the association of a face with identity-specific semantic information, such as the name or job title of a person. We applied an identity-learning task where unfamiliar faces were presented together with a name and a job title in the first encoding phase. Simultaneously, TMS pulses were applied either to the left or right OFA or to Cz, as a control. In the subsequent retrieval phase, the previously seen faces were presented either with two names or with two job titles and the task of the participants was to select the semantic information previously learned. We found that the stimulation of the right or left OFA reduced subsequent retrieval performance for the face-associated job titles. This suggests a causal role of the OFA in the association of faces and related semantic information. Furthermore, in contrast to prior findings, we did not observe hemispherical differences of the TMS intervention, suggesting a similar role of the left and right OFAs in the formation of the visual-semantic associations. Our results suggest the necessity to reconsider the hierarchical face-perception models and support the distributed and recurrent models. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2020-04-27 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7286950/ /pubmed/32342226 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02068-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Original Article Eick, Charlotta Marina Kovács, Gyula Rostalski, Sophie-Marie Röhrig, Lisa Ambrus, Géza Gergely The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title | The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title_full | The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title_fullStr | The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title_full_unstemmed | The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title_short | The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
title_sort | occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286950/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32342226 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02068-9 |
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